Huerta to be honored with Medal of Freedom

Saturday

Apr 28, 2012 at 12:01 AM

STOCKTON - It was a half-century ago that a single mom in Stockton made the historic decision to move with her seven children to Delano. This week, President Barack Obama announced that she will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Dana M. Nichols

STOCKTON - It was a half-century ago that a single mom in Stockton made the historic decision to move with her seven children to Delano. This week, President Barack Obama announced that she will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

That mom was Dolores Huerta. She went to Delano to join activist Cesar Chavez in his efforts to organize farm workers. The organization they formed in 1962 - the National Farm Workers Association - became the United Farm Workers.

"This was the first farm worker union that was successful," said Maria Elena Serna, who in 1968 became the first San Joaquin County resident to join the UFW. "We're still here. This year we are celebrating our 50th anniversary."

The White House press release issued Thursday noted that Huerta "was influential in securing the passage of California's Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, and disability insurance for farm workers in California."

Huerta is one of 13 Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients this year. Others include musician Bob Dylan, astronaut John Glenn and author Toni Morrison. The medals will be presented during a White House ceremony in late spring.

The Medal of Freedom is given to individuals "who have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors."

Those who knew Huerta during her Stockton years and her later UFW work say she and the farm-worker labor movement made a lasting impact on their lives. The United Farm workers had many ups and downs during its 50-year history. After initially winning a number of contracts and legislative battles in the 1960s and 1970s, the UFW declined during the 1980s.

Many early members, like Serna, went on to pursue education and professional careers outside the fields.

Yet while Huerta organized and led people who worked in vineyards and fields, she didn't have to do that work herself, said those who knew her. Instead, her passion to fight for social and economic justice grew out of her early life in Stockton.

"She was better off than the rest of us," said Carmen Fernandez, who attended schools in Stockton with Huerta and later became Huerta's sister-in-law.

Huerta's mother owned a Stockton restaurant and a 70-room hotel, and would sometimes put up farm workers for free. Fernandez said she remembers Huerta loaning her a dress to wear to the prom.

She also remembers Huerta's energy and sociability. Fernandez said she remembers one occasion in the late 1950s when Huerta joined her for a party after having worked a job at the Sheriff's Office during the day and at a bar at night.

"We went to Dad's Point, that park over there, and there was like about a hundred people out there getting together and dancing," Fernandez said.

By that time, both Huerta and Fernandez were doing organizing work with the Community Service Organization.

"We would make home visits to try to get the people organized. And we did," Fernandez said. "We would pick up the people that hadn't voted and get them in to vote."

The organization focused on everyday issues important to Stockton's Latino residents - housing, segregation, police brutality and registering voters. By the early 1960s, both Huerta and fellow organizer Cesar Chavez had concluded that they needed to organize a labor union for farm workers. When leadership nixed the idea, they left and moved to Delano.

Six years later, in 1968, Serna was working in the fields near Lodi when she heard a broadcast of Cesar Chavez on her transistor radio.

"We were trying to get a 5-cent-an-hour raise," Serna said. "He was saying exactly what I was thinking."

Serna borrowed money from her mother to get a bus ticket to Delano, where Chavez was fasting. That trip changed her life, leading her to become a union organizer, and then to pursue a college education.

"I came back and told my mother, 'It's going to be different,' " Serna said.

The UFW - celebrating its 50th anniversary in May - has in recent years gone back to its roots and renewed efforts, though on a smaller scale, to organize farm workers.

Huerta, who turned 82 in April, now has her own foundation that does community organizing and education work. Huerta also continues to maintain ties to the city where she grew up.

She's spoken several times in recent years at the Stockton elementary school that is named for her. And not long before the midterm election in 2010, she led San Joaquin Delta College students in a chant of "Si, se puede," (Yes, we can) and implored them to get involved, to knock on doors, to pass out fliers, to get out the vote. "There's still work to do," she said.

"Si, se puede" was the UFW's slogan long before Barack Obama used it as his presidential campaign slogan.

In 2003, Huerta said during the keynote speech in Stockton at the Latina Women's Business Luncheon: "Teach your children values, teach them to fight for others, for justice, to help with causes."